Monday, December 3, 2012

I am so honored to have JoAnn Spears back at Redwood's Medical Edge. Her posts about the ailments of long lost monarchs are hugely popular and entertaining as well.

This four part Monday series focuses on Ann Boleyn and the mysterious sweating sickness that had a 70% mortality rate! Here are Part I, Part II and Part III.

Welcome back, JoAnn!

Part
IV:The cold hard facts.

Influenza has been around since at least
Hippocrates’ time.It is thought of
today mostly as a nuisance that can be sanitized or vaccinated away.This testifies to a short collective memory
when the story of the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918 is considered.

Within 25 weeks of the beginning of the Spanish Flu
pandemic, an estimated 25 million people died worldwide.When the pandemic finally ended in 1920, as
many as 50 million people had died.In
an era when supportive care for influenza symptoms such as fever was better
understood than it was in Tudor times, the mortality rate for Spanish Flu was still
around 10%.

Ann Boleyn

It doesn’t take much math to figure out that as many
as 500 million people developed Spanish Flu between 1918 and 1920.It was an era when people knew a lot more
about disease transmission than they did when Anne Boleyn retreated to
Hever.As a result, many a large public
gathering was cancelled for preventive purposes during the Spanish Flu pandemic,
and people around the world wore surgical-type face masks when in public.These efforts were unavailing against the
spread of the infection; Spanish Flu was as mysterious and maddening as Anne
Boleyn herself.

Many believe nowadays that Spanish Flu was an avian
virus, akin to the modern H1N1 or bird flu virus which is originates in, and is
spread by, infected poultry.

Anne Boleyn is unlikely to have personally prepared
poultry for consumption.She did,
however, feast in the Tudor court where feathered fare ranging from swallows to
game birds to swans were prepared by the help and consumed by ‘the quality’ with
gusto.The Tudor court was also a home
to falcons which were used by both men and women for hunting for sport.Anne Boleyn’s family crest actually features
a falcon.Parrots and parakeets, novelty
birds from the New World, were also present at the Tudor court as pets.Henry VIII himself was said to have an
African Grey Parrot which could mimic calls to boatsmen on the Thames, leading
more than one of them on a fool’s errand.Another tale says that when the parrot fell into the Thames on one
occasion, it was recognized and rescued only because it started to scream
‘boat!’ as it fell into the river.

The Sweat and the Spanish Flu do not have only a surprising
causation in common.Both claimed, for
the most part, a surprising set of victims.

The Sweat did not prey on vulnerable folk such as
the weak, the very young, and the very old.According to Caius, "They which had this sweat sore with peril of
death were either men of wealth, ease or welfare, or of the poorer sort, such
as were idle persons, good ale drinkers and taverne haunters."Contemporary sources also tell us that men
were disproportionately affected;“mortalitie
fell chieflie or rather upon men, and those of the best age as between thirtie
and fortie years. Few women, nor children, nor old men died thereof".

The Spanish Flu likewise claimed the least likely as
its victims, with many heretofore healthy young adults succumbing.The Spanish Flu pandemic started, in fact, in
an army base in Kansas, claiming the lives of robust young World War I soldiers
while their physicians looked on, helpless. It is thought today that this was
due to a phenomenon known as cytokine storm, a scenario in which a healthy
immune system is actually a liability.

If a virus such as bird flu enters the body through
inhalation, the infection will center in the lungs.It is normal for the body to fight infection
in the lungs with inflammatory responses that are familiar:increased circulation to the area, mucus
production, coughing, fever to ‘burn out’ the infection, etc. In a cytokine
storm, too much of all of these symptoms creates as much of a problem, if not
more of a problem, than the infectious agent itself.Soldiers with Spanish Flu were drowned by
copious blood and fluids produced by their own lungs, possibly as a result of
this phenomenon.Perhaps a similar
phenomenon caused the profuse, and often deadly, heat and
perspiration of Tudor-era Sweat sufferers.

The Sweat, and the Spanish Flu, were both maddening,
mysterious forces, capable of bringing about a strong man’s downfall, and yet
as elusive and as hard to contain as a bird in flight.The association with Henry VIII and Anne
Boleyn, surely, is fitting.

JoAnn
Spears is a registered nurse with Master’s Degrees in Nursing and Public
Administration. Her first novel, Six of One, JoAnn brings a
nurse’s gallows sense of humor to an unlikely place: the story of the six wives
of Henry VIII. Six of Onewas begun in JoAnn’s
native New Jersey. It was wrapped up in the Smoky Mountains of Northeast
Tennessee, where she is pursuing a second career as a writer. She has, however,
obtained a Tennessee nursing license because a) you never stop being a nurse and
b) her son Bill says “don’t quit your day job”.

3 comments:

What a fascinating theory! As someone who has had ordinary flu, several times, I can tell you even today it's more than a nuisance. You sweat, you have fever, you want to do nothing but sleep. If there was no treatment for it, as there wasn't in those days, it coud be fatal - and that's ordinary flu! Bird flu would be more likely to hit the rich than the poor, as you say. And Tey's be heather too, with better food Nd living conditions.Thanks for this series, which I have really enjoyed.

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The medical information presented on this blog is for writers to use in their works of fiction. If a medical question is submitted, it is assumed that it is for a current work of fiction and not related to an actual person’s medical problem. Consult a licensed physician for specific information, advice and treatment related to a medical condition.